The
following is an excerpt from Ran Knishinsky's book, The Clay
Cure:

Health depends
on three factors:

Eating good,
nourishing foods.

Absorbing
those foods properly so your cells don't starve.

Eliminating
all the waste matter from your system

First, to live
vibrantly, the foods that feed the body must be the right
kind--that is, they must contain the vitamins, minerals and
enzymes necessary to feed the cells. Hippocrates was
correct when he said, "Your food shall be your medicine and
your medicine shall be your food." Whatever we put
into the body is automatically used for its growth, maintenance,
and repair. That is exactly how food acts as medicine.
A balanced diet provides the building blocks of a healthy body.

Second, the
body must properly assimilate the foods to receive their vital
nutrients. When the food enters the small intestine, the
pancreas and small bowel wall must send juices and bile to
individually digest the carbohydrates, proteins, and fat.
That's a lot of work for a healthy system, much more so for one
that is already sick. If the body cannot perform this job,
then the cells become weakened and starve.

Third and last
is the importance of elimination. For many years people in
the natural health field have told us that poor bowel health
causes and aggravates disease conditions. Now, research is
beginning to substantiate these beliefs. John Tilden,
M.D., author of Toxemia (1974), states that the basic
cause of disease is insufficient drainage of waste matter: that
toxins have accumulated in the blood above the toleration point,
and disease--call it a cold, a flu, a headache--is the result of
an accumulation of poisons in the system.

If the system
fails to get rid of poisons through the bowels, a constipated
condition arises in which the toxins never leave the body.
They sit inside and putrefy. What's worse, the body
doesn't know the difference between live food and dead food in
the colon. It will still try to get nourishment out of
waste you would never want to set your eyes upon.
Naturally, this puts a strain on every functioning cell in the
body.

THE
CLAY AT WORK

The clay's
immediate action upon the body is directly on the digestive
channel. This involves the clay actually binding with the
toxic substances and removing them from the body with the stool.
It performs this job with every kind of toxin, including those
from the environment, such as heavy metals, and those that occur
naturally as by-products of the body's own health processes,
such as metabolic toxins. It's hard to believe that the
body produces its own toxins, but that may happen as a result of
stress, inefficient metabolism, or the proliferation of free
radicals.

The body has no
problem ridding itself of the clay. Don't worry about a
tiny brick house being built in the middle of your colon.
The clay assists the body's eliminatory process by acting as a
bulking agent, similar to psyllium fiber, sweeping out the old
matter that doesn't need to be there. It is not digested
in the same manner as food as it passes through the alimentary
canal. Instead, it stimulates intestinal peristalsis, the
muscular contractions that move food and stool through the
bowels. The clay and the adsorbed toxins are both
eliminated together; this keeps the toxins from being reabsorbed
into the bloodstream.